Il fascismo e gli studi storico-religiosi: appunti sul discorso pubblico di Buonaiuti e Pettazzoni

This paper aims to provide some indications on the “public consumption” of the historical-religious disciplines during Fascism, starting with the two “tutelary deities” of Italian religious sciences in the 1920s and 1930s, Ernesto Buonaiuti and Raffaele Pettazzoni, in their capacity as disseminators of content intended for mass culture and usable by non-specialists. The season of research on the sacralization of politics has demonstrated the importance of the religious component in the “factory” of 20th-century ideologies. That questions us about the role played in this process by the conceptual tools developed by religious experts themselves. Coming out of the strictly academic sphere, the archive of images and meanings matured in a defining historiographical field became part of public discourse, at the cost of trivialization and political uses.